Urban Working Fuel: The Eco-Pod

The ever-inimitable Blah City recently brought our attention to the Eco-Pod, a concept developed by Höweler + Yoon Architecture in collaboration with Squared Design Lab. The pods are both modular office spaces (and, as everyone knows, we love all things stackable) and sources of fuel: the pods harvest micro-algae, which serves as a highly promising bio-fuel type.

The micro-algae part is quite interesting in itself, as farming algae only requires sugar and cellulose. When we were at Day One of the recent What Design Can Do! Conference at Amsterdam’s Stadsschouwburg, fashion designer Suzanne Lee shared her experiments in growing clothing using cellulose. It looks like cellulose is the next wave in reformulating how and where we work, and what we wear when we head there.

The OfficePOD is made for people who prefer to work at home and try to avoid boring colleague chats and after work traffic jams. The workplace measures two by two meters and is designed for employees who can work at home, but cannot find the rest in their own house. A workplace in the angle of the sleep chamber or to the kitchen table is not always ideal, certainly not if there are people cleaning around you, or children scream for attention.

Hey urban composters, this one is for you! During our stay here in Dublin we had the chance to chat with the guys of ABGC, a design and architecture firm that has its office in the city’s South Studios. They showed us some of recent projects, including a little wormery called WormWorks. This urban balcony composter drew our immediate attention as it perfectly combines the recycling philosophy with a-do-it-yourself mentality plus great design on top of that.

Architect Gary Chang is one of the approximately 7 million Hong Kong inhabitants living in a small 30 square meters apartment behind one of the concrete facades of a recognizable Hong Kong skyscraper. While many Hong Kong inhabitants more or less share the way they furnish their shoebox apartments (as seen in Michael Wolf’s photo…

On his amazing City of Sound blog Dan Hill recently described a tour through a forest near Estonia’s capital Tallinn. What made this trip spectacular was Tetsuo Kondo’s suspended ramp that flows trough the 300-years old woods of Kadriorg. The ramp allows visitors to explore the forest from a totally different perspective as it adds a layer of experience to the landscape….